Hemant is running a poll for best atheist billboard of 2012. Well, we certainly do enough of them, don't we? Among the nominees is the African Americans for Humanism ad, "You're One of Many." Go vote for it.

[Some say] that money spent on advertising is wasted, but I strongly disagree with that. Whether or not you support the specific way they're going about it, American Atheists' billboard campaign has a clear point: it's visibility. We can't assume that everyone who'd like to join the skeptical movement is already aware of us; in fact, we know that that isn't the case.

Gary Marcus at The New Yorker suggests that science and academia change its incentive structure and encourage repetition and oversight to curtail fraud and sloppy science.

Early next year, scientists at CERN say they will be able to say definitively that the particle they found was the Higgs boson:

The latest data we have on this thing we have been watching for the past few months show that it is not simply ‘like a Higgs’ but is very like a Higgs.

Two big op-eds, one a "guest post" for Maureen Dowd and another by Michael Gerson, grapple with faith in a just God in the wake of the Newtown atrocity. Both, it seems to me, are based on a kind of resignation to circular logic, a kind of optimistic fatalism that frankly saddens me.

Kylie Sturgess rounds up the year's news with Sharon Hill on Token Skeptic.

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Paul Fidalgo has been communications director of the Center for Inquiry since 2012. He holds a master’s degree in political management from George Washington University, and has worked previously for FairVote: The Center for Voting and Democracy and the Secular Coalition for America. Paul is also an actor and musician whose work includes five years performing with the American Shakespeare Center. He lives in Maine with his wife and kids. His blog is Near-Earth Object, and he tweets at @paulfidalgo.